For All The Overwhelmed Mamas

Uncategorized
Jun 04, 2018

This week’s post is for all you mamas out there who are overwhelmed with life. Who are overwhelmed with trying to keep all the balls in the air.

TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO: I get it. I know what it’s like to feel frazzled and to feel like I’m completely and utterly overwhelmed. I wanted to share with you a couple of tips that you can use to calm yourself down when you’re getting to that point where you feel like everything is escalating, where if one more thing happens you just might snap.

What do I mean by snap?

It's when we feel ourselves escalating. It’s almost like this energy is coming up through our bodies, and we can feel it just getting to a point where we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to hold it in any longer.

When you get to that point where you’ve asked your kids to do something over and over and over again and they’re just not listening or when your baby keeps waking up in the middle of the night and you are just utterly exhausted. Where your husband says he’s going to be home but he calls and he says, “You know what? I have to work late”, and you think, “Oh my gosh. I was just holding on, waiting for that moment when you would walk through the door so I could have a break”.

All of those times when you’re feeling like if one more thing happens you aren’t going to be able to continue to hold it all together. That’s what I describe as “about to snap.”

Here are a few strategies to try the next time everything piles up and you need a way to calm yourself down.

1) Take Some Time by Yourself

I know that if you have little babies, this can feel almost impossible, but it’s not. What you can do is set your baby in their crib. You can put them in a playpen. Put them somewhere safe where you can go and just breathe.

Go by yourself. Go in the bathroom. That’s my favorite place to hide out. My kids aren’t babies anymore. They’re 8 and 6, but still, when I feel myself escalating like that, I’ll often just say, “I’m going to take a couple of minutes here”, because I know that if I don’t, I’m going to spew all over them. Often it’s not even anything they are doing. It’s just all of the things that are happening in my life that I’m feeling overwhelmed.

Take some time and just excuse yourself. Go to the bathroom, like I said, my favorite place to hide out. I can shut the door and they can be out there knocking, but it doesn’t matter. I’m in there by myself. Take a couple of minutes and just breathe. Take a few deep breaths, deep breath in and out, in and out. Allow whatever has escalated you to the point where you feel like you are going to become completely overwhelmed and say things and do things that you don’t really want to say and do.

Just take those deep breaths in and out. Say out loud, “I release all negative energy. I release all negative emotions, vibrations, thought forms and beliefs. I release whatever emotion it is”. Is it anger? Is it upset? Is it overwhelm? Just say, “I release that from my body now”, taking a deep breath in and releasing.

First, take some time away to give yourself a couple of minutes just to regain your composure. Know that it’s okay. You’re not the only person out there who’s feeling this way. All of us moms are feeling overwhelmed at times. It’s hard. It’s hard to have little people who depend on us all the time and then to do everything else that we do, work, keep the household running, see our friends, take care of our relationships.

All of us have to take care of ourselves. We have a lot on our plates, and it can feel really overwhelming. Give yourself that couple of minutes to just regain your composure.

2) Allow Yourself To Feel It

In the moment, you might not have time to feel it because you’ve got stuff to do, right? The kids are there. Are you going to have time to feel it in that moment? Maybe not,but give yourself some time at some point to really feel it.

Let yourself feel that overwhelm and what it feels like to have somebody depend on you all the time, to feel like you are spiraling out of control, to feel like you need some help but you don’t know where to turn, all of those things. Let yourself feel that.

3) Release It

After you have taken time away and have really allowed yourself to feel it. Now it’s time to give yourself a way to release it.

You can do some journaling. I’m a big writer. Just write about it. Write about how you’re feeling. Don’t censor it. Just write, write, write, write, write about everything that’s happening for you, how you’re feeling. Just get it out of you. Then take that writing and tear it up or burn it. Get rid of it. Go for a walk. Go for a run. Do some jumping jacks. Do some breathing. Just release what’s happening for you in those moments.

Those are a few calming techniques. Now, one of the prevention techniques that you can do so you don’t find yourself getting to that point all the time.

1) Let Yourself Feel It and Release It

What we can experience is that everything starts to pile up inside of us. If we’re not releasing it, it just continues to pile up, pile up. If we’re not letting that valve out a little bit, then when it does explode, it’s because of all of that stuff that we’ve allowed to pile up.

Give yourself time to let little bits of energy out at a time. Doing that breathing, doing that releasing, taking care of yourself, making sure that you’re having some time where you have downtime, where you have you time. Even if it’s just five minutes a day where you have a bath where it’s just you.

Again, sometimes we don’t have the support of other people in our lives. Maybe our husband’s working late. Maybe we’re a single mom. Maybe they work out of town. Maybe we don’t have family around, whatever it is. Find a way that you can put your little ones aside and just have them in a safe place and then you can take five minutes at the very least where you can have just time for yourself.

You have to take care of yourself. If you’re not, that overwhelm will come faster and fiercer and stronger all the time.

I hope that these calming and prevention techniques are helpful for you.

I have put together a free training that goes into a lot more depth around how you can manage when you’re feeling really, really overwhelmed and what you can do when you feel like you’re really just about to lose it, snap, whatever you want to call it.

Then I talk a lot about what the prevention techniques are that you can use so that you don’t find yourself getting to that point all of the time. We’re all going to get there. There’s no getting around it, but it’s about finding a way to manage getting there less.